Re: Speed on Raq

[Patrick Schoonveld <pschoonveld@venux.net>]

Granted I don't know your config, but what I have learned tells me that
ram is important, but web serving is 90% disk access. Unless you are
loading all your files into a ram drive, then serving from that, that
isn't going to make a giant difference. Granted, I feel that a load of
ram is excellent, but RAID 5 can actually be slower! A mirroring or even
striping through RAID1 can be faster. RAID 5 uses parity in order to be
able to handle redundancy. But, most RAID configs use super fast ultra
wide SCSI drives and controllers, thus increasing the speed versus say a
standard EIDE hard drive. But, I don't think RAM is your biggest factor
in these terms. Although, I never skimp on it when building a server.
Apache and databases need that space.


Kyle Hayes wrote:
> 
> ******    message to minivend-users from Kyle Hayes <kyle540@quicknet.net>     ******
> 
> On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Cameron Prince wrote:
> 
> > ******    message to minivend-users from Cameron Prince <PRINCECB@novachem.com>     ******
> >
> > We originally setup our two stores on Cobalt RaQs. The performance was piss
> > poor! These boxes have a non-Intel processor called a MIPS and it's about
> > the equivalent of a Pentium 100 MHz. CGI-Wrap is turned on by default and
> > Minivend will fail, but the big kicker is that CyberCash (and most other
> > credit card verification programs)encryption/decryption won't run on it.
> > This is because their programs were compiled for linux on the Intel
> > platform. If you plan on having an extremely low usage store front, the RaQ
> > may be a good place for you, but we ended up co-locating our own servers
> > with our ISP.
> 
> I just converted over from a Pentium 166 to a P-II 400.  I would not call
> the results spectacular, but it is now usable.  With the Pentium machine,
> things were very slow on the checkout page.  Just getting the page on the
> screen could take 10 seconds.   Now, it is more like 2 or 3.
> 
> Cobalts are cute little machines, but I don't know that I would serve
> much dynamic content from one.
> 
> PaymentNet (now called Signio) has/had a client piece written in Perl that
> did the client-side encryption and connect.  It sounds like CyberCash is
> just trying to skim the cream with the Intel boxes.
> 
> > I have a Compaq Prolient 450Mhz Server with RAID-5 ($7,000.00) for one and a
> > http://www.hitech-usa.com/ 450Mhz Server ($2,000.00) for the other with both
> > running RedHat v6.0. Both stores smoke now. I would guess performance is up
> > by at least 70%.
> 
> Yikes.  Only 70%??!?  You should get a _factor_ of 7 speed up, especially
> on the RAID box!  We put enough RAM in our server to make sure that the
> disk is not the deciding factor in anything.  That seems to help a lot.
> All my previous experience tells me that if your web server hits the disk
> for anything more than booting, you will have bad performance.
> 
> A lot of people seem to try to "save" money by not putting enough RAM in
> their webservers.  I think this is a mistake.
> 
> Best,
> Kyle
> 
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